Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Industrial Indicator Makes the Move from PLC to FPGA via hack a day

I agree..big, chunky industrial controls and displays bring a flashy element to nearly any build. This article gives us a starting point to include more of them in your own projects. Build it…and build it BIG! (SMILE) — Douglas

Industrial controls are fun to use in a build because they’re just so — well, industrial. They’re chunky and built to take a beating, both from the operating environment and the users. They’re often power guzzlers, though, so knowing how to convert an industrial indicator for microcontroller use might be a handy skill to have.

Having decided that an Allen-Bradley cluster indicator worked with the aesthetic of his project, a Halloween prop of some sort, [Glen] set about dissecting the controls. Industrial indicators usually make that a simple task so that they can be configured for different voltages in the field, and it turned out that the easiest approach to replacing the power-hungry incandescent bulbs with LEDs was to build a tiny PCB to fit inside the four-color lens.